STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
747 
HIDGK. HISTORY ABROAD. FIRST NOTICED IN 1740. 
we recognize as the parasitic destroyers, hosts of which every¬ 
where accompany the midge in its native countries. And the 
yellow larvae washed from the wheat ears by the rains reminds 
us of their evacuating the grain when the straw is wet, being 
unable to adhere to and crawl down it when dry. 
Thirty years later, a more correct knowledge of this insect had 
been obtained, as appears from a brief notice of it, given by 
Christopher Gullet, in a letter, “ On the effects of elder in pre¬ 
serving growing plants from insects and flies,” published in the 
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1772. This 
letter shows the writer to have been a careful and intelligent 
observer. Under the third head, “ The preservation of the crops 
of wheat from the yellows and destructive insects,” he says— 
“ What the farmers call the yellows in wheat, and which they 
consider as a kind of mildew, is in fact occasioned by a small 
yellow fly with (iridescent-) blue wings, about the size of a gnat. 
This blows in the ear of the corn, and produces a worm, almost 
invisible to the naked eye ; but being seen through a pocket 
microscope, it appears a large yellow maggot, of the color and 
gloss of amber, and is so prolific that I last week distinctly counted 
forty-one living yellow maggots in the husk of one single grain 
of wheat — a number sufficient to eat up and destroy the corn in 
a whole ear. * * * These small insects are the crop’s greatest 
enemy. One of these yellow flies laid at least eight or ten eggs 
of an oblong shape on my thumb, only while carrying by the wing 
across three or four ridges.” 
Some twenty-five years after this, when all Europe had become 
alarmed by the accounts of the appaling ravages of the Hessian 
fly in the wheat crops of America, and men of science were exa¬ 
mining the grain fields to discover if any such insect existed 
there, Mr. Marsham, in the year 1795, brought the wheat midge 
to public notice, in an article published in tho Transactions of 
the Linnaaan Society, vol. iii, p. 142, aud a subsequent one in vol. 
iv, p. 224 | and the Rev. William Kirby, now in the dawn of his 
entomological eminence, gave quite an interesting and for the 
most part a very accurate account of its economy and habits, and 
its parasitic destroyers, in the same publication, vol. iv, p. 230, 
and vol. v, p. 96, describing the midge scientifically under the 
Tipula Tritici, and naming its three parasites the Ichneumon 
Tipula, I. inserens and /. punctiger, by which names they continue 
